[DawnII]

Hi guys, I'm hoping you can help me with this nasty problem.

About two days ago, Vista started running like crap, everything was opening slow and it wasn't due to CPU load or memory usage. So naturally I assume the best, the system simply needs a restart. Lo and behold, I fail to boot into Vista anymore. The screen generally freezes on loading Vista bootloader. I don't even get to see the green bar.

I first tried repeated hard reboots and got the same result. It was pretty obvious at this point that likely my hard drive was at fault. After a while the bootloader would go through, but I would be confronted by the "peripheral or hardware not properly connected, Vista failed to boot" error instead.

Eventually I did manage to boot to desktop, which was just as slow as before I shut it down. I decided to run disk defrag to see if it would help any, which it did. My computer ran almost as well and stable for about 6 hours. Then it happened again (upon trying to load a game of Civ 4). This time I tried shutting down through the OS, but now the same result and I can't get lucky enough to boot to desktop again.

I have tried Startup Repair, and I get the message that it is unable to fix the issue I am having. I believe the problem is either my hard drive or malware related. If anyone can help I would really appreciate it.

Here are my system specs:
EVGA 680i 122-CK-NF68-A1 Mobo
Silverstone ST75F 750W PSU
Core 2 Duo E6600 OCed to 3.0 GHz
Patriot 2x1 GB DDR2 Ram
Seagate Barracuda 320 GB 7200 RPM Hard Drive

Thanks for your time guys!

[jbhardman]

You could drop your bios back to normal everything and get rid of your overclocking. Just to see...

[DawnII]

Thanks for the suggestion, I did try it though. No luck, I didn't really expect it to do much anyway as it has been running stable for almost a year now, and I stressed it plenty with Orthos.

I have managed to make some headway, originally I wasn't able to even boot the Vista install disk, but I finally managed to get into it and run startup repair now. Chkdsk is currently running, hopefully I'll be able to boot into desktop and get a HijackThis log up.

[davehc]

[quote=DawnII;5915603]"and it wasn't due to CPU load or memory usage. So naturally I assume the best, the system simply needs a restart. "

A very positive statement! How did you check that? It does seem that you may have lost a stick of Ram, or the graphics ram has broken down.
Have you tried reseating the ram?

[DawnII]

I was monitoring CPU and memory usage through both the Vista sidebar gadget and Everest. There was no spike in either when attempting to open various folders or browsers when there was a clear lag in processing those tasks.

I haven't tried reseating the RAM, I will give it a shot but having successfully gotten it to boot up I believe it is not at fault. Chkdsk seems to have run successfully, although it rebooted before I had a chance to look at any of the information. It's been running somewhat smoothly now for about 3 hours, although I haven't tried running anything very intensive on it yet.

I'll update on any further developments, but thanks for your responses!

P.S. HijackThis log here: http://forums.techguy.org/malware-re...-not-boot.html

[blazemore]

Might sound stupid, but have you tried using the Vista repair disk? Run the Startup Repair Wizard, and if that fails, open the terminal and type

bootrec /fixboot
followed by
bootrec /fixmbr

If that fails, try using a bootable diagnostic tool like Hiren's.BootCD.9.5 to test your hardware to find out the bit of hardware that's giving you grief.

[DawnII]

Thanks for the suggestion, I did try Startup Repair and it seems I've been able to boot ok now (tried cold booting twice, had no troubles). Hopefully this will continue.

I did get my hands on Hiren's boot cd, do you have any suggestions for which program to run for HDDs? I ran MemCheck and everything checked out, I tried running CPU-Video-Disk but it wouldn't go through and The Troubleshooter hangs on Detecting Hardware.

[Aussie_matu]

I had the same problem and have just recovered from it. (i mean seriously while im typing this up, im finishing off the recovery)
I had the same error and everything, so what i done was reformatted the whole thing back to XP, then went to Vista, then strangely it worked, i might of lost all my files but it was worth it.
P.S i don't recommend going to vista if you get the XP to work, i put it there because people who may be interested in buying it like aero which is so

If that doesn't work im sure that there are plenty of other people out there that will help you out!, good luck.

[gmysak]

I have had exactly the same problem.
My system is sumwhat faster than yours and has twice the ram.
It's not your computer it's VISTA.
My advice dump it get XP service pack 3 and wate a year or two before getting vista when a few sevice packs are out.

Dump vista and your problems will be solved!!!!!!!!!!

[DawnII]

Ha I figured it might have been Vista, everything seems to check out. This hasn't happened until I installed SP1, so I guess that may be the issue.